


confusingly, upsettingly human

by kickedshins



Series: lions, free of the colosseum [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Post-Canon, hera is going to get a body, i did not expect this to have so much jacobi in it but here we are, takes place during the three-month return trip to earth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27613015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins
Summary: So Hera’s okay. So her crew—Minkowski’s crew, really—is alive. So she’s going to Earth.Huh. Earth. Back to Earth, technically, because that’s where she originated, but she doesn’t feel any sort of connection to it. Earth is the place where she was made—born, whatever—and the place where a glitch was put in her matrices, and the place where she spent the least important part of her life. Her real home is the Hephaestus, is the people within.If she’s with them, she supposes, everything’s going to turn out alright in the end.orThe survivors' ship makes the return trip to Earth.
Relationships: Hera & Daniel Jacobi, background Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski
Series: lions, free of the colosseum [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2018857
Comments: 20
Kudos: 38





	confusingly, upsettingly human

**Author's Note:**

> wow! hi! welcome to what will probably ideally become A Wolf Three Fifty Nine Post-Canon Series! i have many thoughts and feelings about everyone in this show and i have many thoughts and feelings about what might happen post-canon and what better way to combine those than to write fic. much more to come, probably. for now, enjoy the first month of the urania's return trip to earth!

**Sept 25th, 2016**

Rebooting, Hera assumes, feelings nothing like waking up.

On the _Hephaestus,_ it always starts in engineering. A hum, a tug at her circuits, a jolt through her system. It spreads outward from there, through the observation deck, the sleeping quarters, the communications room. Out towards the hull of the ship. Hera’s fingers, if she had them, would be outstretched right about now. Trembling like the wings of a bird.

Hera’s made of plates of metal and the abrasive edges of sandpaper and is held together with duct tape and a whole lot of heart, and now that she’s entirely part of the _Urania_ , everything feels a bit wrong. It’s tricky to figure out what goes where, which command controls which aspect of the ship, if she’s going to accidentally turn the _Urania_ around and send everyone jettisoning back out into deep space. Her controls feel abrasive, uncomfortable, like there’s sand in her circuit board that refuses to be shaken out.

Rebooting hurts. Rebooting should make Hera feel better, but it usually just makes her feel wrong, and she’s pretty positive that that’s not how waking up feels. Doug would always complain about waking up, but she’s guessing that that’s just Doug. Besides, he never seemed to be in any sort of pain. He’d blink sleep lazily from his eyes, yawn like a cartoon character, and stretch with all the panache of a man who knows he’s being watched by the girl he not-so-secretly has feelings for. And he’d make some comment about wanting five more minutes, or about how Minkowski acts like an overbearing mom on a school day, or something, and Hera’d snark at him, and he’d snark back, and that seemed to get him going more than any cup of seaweed coffee ever did.

Rebooting isn’t like that at all. It aches, and it aches deep, and Hera doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing, and for a second, she panics. But she manages to calm herself before any electrical surges occur, which is good, because last she recalled, things were well and truly fucked (Lovelace was passed out on the _Hephaestus_ floor, Jacobi was probably dead via explosive, and Minkowski was worrying over Doug’s amnesia-afflicted body), and she wouldn’t want to make it any worse. 

Hera quickly takes stock of the goings-on of the ship. It’s much smaller than the _Hephaestus_ was, and whoever patched her over did a damn decent job of it, because as much as she feels the discomfort of everything not being in the place it’s all been for the past three years, she’s almost certain she’s not missing any important parts of herself.

She can save that for later, though. For now, she runs an assessment of the crew.

The _Urania_ ’s a bit more high-tech than the _Hephaestus_ , and her vision—well, not _vision_ , but the series of systems that processes biometric readings and heat signatures and everything else that gives her as close to the concept of “vision” as she’s going to get—is crisper, so she can say with near-certainty that the scene that’s laid out in front of her makes almost no sense. 

Doug: Still without his memories, she’d assume. Currently sleeping in what Hera knows used to be Maxwell’s room, and, hell, if that isn’t a can of worms Hera simply cannot open right now.

Minkowski: Lying unconscious in the infirmary. Her stomach is messily bandaged, wrapped up like a lifesized matryoshka doll with how many layers of gauze cover a brutal-looking gunshot wound. It’s almost like a snapshot of a kitschy horror movie with how bloody and over-the-top the entire situation is. And next to her…

Lovelace: Blinking unsteadily as blood trickles out of her arm and into a bag Hera assumes she’s going to use for transfusion purposes. One hand rests lightly on Minkowski’s knee; the other is fisted painfully tight at her side. Lovelace’s eye closes, then flutters open, and the other, out of sync, follows suit. She looks closer to death than Hera’s seen her since— well, since she died.

And that should be it. But it’s not.

Miranda Pryce: Also asleep. In what used to be Kepler’s quarters. Hera doesn’t want to think about it. 

Finally, Daniel Jacobi: Alive, somehow. And, apparently, the one keeping this ship afloat.

Hera’s speakers crackle to life with a croaky, unsteady noise, and Jacobi is the only person lucid enough to flinch at it. “H-hey,” she says, and damn her, if only she could have left her glitch behind on the _Hephaestus_ along with Rachel Young’s dead body. “So, you’re here.”

“Hera,” he says, and she’s pretty sure he was aiming for curt, but it comes out a broken, mangled mess of emotions, and she’s feeling a bit too raw to deal with those right now, so she’s glad when he clears his throat twice and forces his vocal cords to cooperate in producing a bit more of a composed-sounding noise. “I… yes, I’m here. You don’t need to sound so happy.”

“Jumping with joy,” she assures him. “Do you w-want to give me the rundown on what happened, or am I supposed to extrapolate it from the data points around me?”

“Hang on,” he mutters, punching something into some panel with one hand, and Hera should know what he’s doing, but she’s still not entirely up-and-running enough for that, or to figure out why his other arm hangs limply by his side, so all she can do is hope he’s not betraying her tentative trust. “Yeah, okay. Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

With a scoff, Jacobi pushes away from whatever it was he was doing and sits cross-legged in mid-air. “Everyone’s alive,” he tells her, his good shoulder shaking. From tension or stress or fear or adrenaline or something else entirely, she’s not sure.

Relief, maybe. Jesus, it could be relief.

“Thank goodness,” she says.

“Thank _me_ ,” he corrects, and, wow, great to know that humans can be as obnoxiously stuck in their insufferable personality as ever no matter the circumstances.

“Maybe later,” she tells him. “Go on?”

“Everyone’s alive,” Jacobi repeats, “and I patched you over here—no thanks to Pryce, by the way, which, okay, what’s the use of having a perfectly good nerd on hand if she can’t help you out—”

Hera makes the split-second decision that her words on the matter can wait until after she gets a grip on the situation.

“—and Minkowski passed out because of blood loss, so the Captain’s trying her damndest to replenish that. It’s– ugh, it’s so affectionate. I’ve never seen her look so… _soft_.” Jacobi’s nose wrinkles, and it’s a strangely adorable look on him, and Hera can’t help but laugh.

“How k–kind-hearted of you.”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just a bit strange. Badass Captain Lovelace, fearsome and unaffected and so very fuckin’ cool,” Jacobi says, and Hera’s not a gambler, but she’d put good money on the chance that Jacobi’s regurgitating the same words Doug spewed out to him the first time SI-5 got his cryo-affected self to ‘fess up about the crew of the _Hephaestus_. “So that’s the two of them. As for the last member of your crew, Eiffel’d probably want me to say he’s gone all Finding Nemo, or something, but Dory’s the wrong type of memory loss, and also I hate anything with talking animals in it, so I won’t.”

Jacobi’s wraparound way of saying he cares for her friends, that he understands them, that he’s kept a decent enough watch on them while she was out of commission, is so stupidly in-character and obstinate that Hera thinks she might short-circuit. 

He’s drumming his fingers on his knee, and she’d think he was distracted if she didn’t know him as well as she does, which is a reality that she’s going to address later. He just moves around a lot.

“What is your vendetta against animals?” Hera asks. “First the d-ducks, now this?”

He holds up his hands defensively. “Humans talk. Animals don’t. That’s the way of the world.”

“You’re weird,” she says. “Also, I’ve never seen Finding Nemo. Also, whoa, okay, about ten different sources of information just came rushing b-back to me at once, including navigation, and why we are not at all headed t-towards Earth, the hell, Jacobi?”

“Oh!” He looks pleased. “So it worked!”

"What?"

“You don’t have to call any of us by rank or title now.”

“Okay,” Hera says, and then, “so you thought that was of the utm-most importance, but an earthbound trajectory could wait?”

“Oddly enough, I don’t actually know the specifics of how to plot a course,” he says cooly. “I’m good at my job, and half-decent at some of the things Maxwell did, because she liked to talk while she worked and I liked background noise while I did, and part of what she talked about included very basic programming regarding what units like you are allowed to say. Plus, as I’m sure you know from your files, I did go to MIT. Predictably, I do have some coding experience under my belt, and your speech restrictions were not that difficult to rewrite. That aside, though, not a second of my training included plotting as precise a course as this would be. Or, if it did, I forgot it. We’re going to have to wait until one of our two lovely Navigations Officers are at functioning capacity before we start to go anywhere other than ‘nebulously away from Wolf 359’.”

That, upsettingly, is a good explanation. Hera’s itching for a fight, riding on the discomfort of a reboot and the synthetic adrenaline of a close escape and the sheer frustration of not being able to do a damn thing to save her best friend from getting his brain wiped, but Jacobi’s refusing to put up his fists and swing.

She settles on saying, “Okay.” It doesn’t feel right, though, so she says it again, but that still doesn’t feel right, so she hisses out a puff of steam and frustration, and, shit, she’s not leaking gas anywhere in the ship, is she?

“Okay,” Jacobi says back. “So, the main objective right now is not dying, I guess.”

“You guess,” she laughs. It’s a hoarse thing, her voice rusty, unaccustomed to the _Urania_ ’s sound system and, as of late, to humor. “Has anyone ever t-told you that you’re not really a leader?”

“Pot, kettle,” he says, but he doesn’t try to argue with her. “Yes, though, in short, while you were rebooting, Lovelace decided she was gonna play doctor, so the ladies are in the infirmary. Or, two of the ladies. No clue what Pryce is doing, but as long as she’s not breaking anything, I don’t really care. She’s a problem I do not feel like dealing with right now.”

“She’s certainly a p-problem,” Hera agrees venomously. 

“And Eiffel’s asleep right now. So that leaves you and me, baby.” Instantly, his face twists like he’s bitten into a lemon. “Awful. No. Terrible. I was trying something, because that’s how Eiffel talks to you, and that’s how I’m gonna assume Maxwell talked to you in private—”

“Well, first of all, Doctor M-Maxwell clearly did not value me enough to call me a pet name, and b-besides, she wasn’t— I mean, we didn’t— she—”

Jacobi cuts her off. “Hera,” he asks, “do you know what sitting shiva is?”

She’s taken aback. “I mean, I know pretty much everything, so. Of c-course I do. The Jewish ritual of a w-week-long mourning period wherein th—”

“Right,” Jacobi says, and now that she’s focusing a little more acutely on his biometrics, he probably looks terrible right about now. He’s injured in several places, rather egregiously so, most significantly in one of his arms, and his heart rate is dangerously high. “Well, I wasn’t granted even one day of mourning for both her or for– ah, for Warren Kepler, so throw me a bone and refrain from throwing your complex cocktail of emotions about Alana onto me until after I’ve decompressed, alright? I don’t have time to think about my feelings right now. I’ve got a ship to run. And you’ve got exactly the same.”

Hera finds herself agreeing with him, likely because it’d be too unproductive of a circular struggle to argue with this beat-up of a man while she herself is barely at 75%. He’s right that he hasn’t had time to process losing the two people closest to him in any real capacity. And she’s right to be mad as hell at Maxwell and to be kind of delighted that Kepler’s gone. Those ideas can both be true congruently. Those ideas both compute.

“Anyway,” he continues, “I was trying something, and it did not work. I can promise you wholeheartedly that I’m never going to do that again.”

“Much appreciated,” Hera says, meaning it just as wholeheartedly. “That was atrocious.”

“Potentially the worst crime I’ve ever committed,” Jacobi laughs, and that’s not really funny to Hera, because he has actively blown up a hospital, among other things, so she doesn’t laugh with him, but she can understand, a bit, why he finds it amusing.

She really hopes he’s not rubbing off on her.

“Keep everyone al-live, got it,” she says. “Did you have a gameplan beyond that, or were you w-waiting for me to reboot to confer?” 

“Nah,” Jacobi says, and he heads towards the exit of the room. He moves a bit like a cat, Hera thinks. A housecat, though. Nothing like Lovelace’s alleycat slink. He’d probably threaten to blow her up if she ever told him that, which makes her want to tell him that, but with him as on-edge as he is right now, her statistical analysis and common sense alike tell her that he honestly might follow through on such a threat, so she refrains.

“Are you going to elabor-rate, or…?”

“I was waiting for you to reboot so that I could get Lovelace to patch up my arm,” he tells her, and she notices much too late that one of his arms is bent at a terrible angle, hanging limply by his side. “Got busted in the blast. I’d be worried about my ears, but they’ve been halfway to useless for quite a while now, and since I can still sort of mostly understand you with my hearing aids on, I feel okay.”

“Jacobi,” Hera asks rhetorically, finding that she very much enjoys not having to address him as _Mister._ “Is it broken?”

“No,” he says, deadpan and frustratingly calm for how fucked-up his body looks now that Hera’s paying closer attention to it, “I just overextended my wrist a bit.”

“I’ll w-warn you that Captain Lovelace isn’t in the best state of mind right n-now,” Hera says. “By which I mean she’s lost a lot of blood. V-voluntarily. Don’t expect a miracle.”

“We’ve managed to pull those off before,” Jacobi shrugs. “ _I’ve_ managed to pull those off before. We all know Isabel Lovelace sure as hell has. So. I dunno.”

He slips out of the room and down towards the infirmary, and Hera knows she could easily continue her conversation with him, but she honestly doesn’t want to. She has a lot of feelings to sort through right now, and Jacobi on a good day is the opposite of calming.

So Hera’s okay. So her crew—Minkowski’s crew, really—is alive. So she’s going to Earth.

Huh. Earth. Back to Earth, technically, because that’s where she originated, but she doesn’t feel any sort of connection to it. Earth is the place she was made—born, whatever—and the place a glitch was put in her matrices, and the place where she spent the least important part of her life. Her real home is the _Hephaestus_ , is the people within.

If she’s with them, she supposes, everything’s going to turn out alright in the end.

Hera’s a worrier by nature, and there’s a lot going on to worry about. Doug doesn’t have his memories, is possibly not even the same person, and Hera doesn’t even know how to approach that problem, so she sets it aside for the moment. Miranda Pryce is alive and here and a piece of putty made for molding the same way Hera once was, but Hera’s hands are kinder creatures, her nails less sharp. If she has to touch this lump of clay at all, she’s not going to gouge it. And right now, it’s just Hera and Jacobi and Lovelace that are at all operational, and Jacobi’s hurt and Lovelace is, too, and Hera herself is not yet at full-functioning capacity, because rebooting takes a bit, and rebooting _hurts_.

And Hera’d thought that rebooting isn’t anything like waking up, and it isn’t, but she thinks that maybe it’s like being reborn.

She can consult with Lovelace about it later.

**Sept 26th, 2016**

The _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ falls into Wolf 359, and its Commander isn’t even awake to see the splash of red light it causes to illuminate her communications officer’s confused, enthralled face. 

Hera sometimes wishes she could close her eyes.

**Sept 29th-Oct 16th, 2016**

There are three empty bodies aboard the _Urania_.

Pryce is the easiest to navigate. After Hera talks to her, Miranda spends most of her time apart from everyone else. She helps out when an extra set of hands are needed—which is more often than anyone is comfortable with, honestly, because even though she’s not the same person she once was, it’s difficult to look at her and not feel afraid—and that’s pretty much it. They discuss what’ll happen to her when she gets back to Earth, and they discuss what’ll happen to her on the off chance that her memories return, but they don’t make a giant effort to bond with her, or anything. She’s going her own way when they get back, and everyone is perfectly alright with that. 

The most important takeaway from any conversations with her is that Hera no longer glitches when she speaks. It’s strange that Doug Eiffel will never know a Hera who stumbles over her words.

Oh, Eiffel. Doug. It’s funny, Hera thinks. She’s been calling him Doug for years. In her mind, at least. But now that she has to call him Doug out loud, it feels foreign. She doesn’t want him to be a different person. She wants Pryce– Miranda, she wants Miranda to be a different person. She knows, logically, that these two ideas can’t exist congruently, but she’s always been one to bend the rules. She’s good at loopholes. She’s good at defying odds. She hopes that he continues to be good at all that, too. He certainly was when he was Eiffel. It shouldn’t be any different now that he’s Doug.

He’s not exactly empty, per se. He’s a blank slate, wiped almost completely clean, but there are parts of him that have to be innate. His laugh sounds the same as before, and though he says _Hera_ like she’s a stranger and not his best friend, it’s the same two phonemes coming out of the same smart mouth, and Hera can pretend that that’s good enough. 

He takes a while to sift through his old tapes and memories, but when he’s done, he goes up to Minkowski with a list of things he wants to keep from his old life. ASL is the first bullet point. _Star Wars_ is not written down.

The third body is the strangest, though. They’re dealing with the body of Hera’s biological—technological? whatever, she made her—mother and the body of the man who’s part of her _real_ family, and they’ve, in an AI’s terms, had their memory cards fully removed, and, somehow, the third body is still the strangest. It’s a pile of android limbs, a torso, and a head lying on the floor of what used to be Maxwell’s room and is now Minkowski and Doug’s. 

(Minkowski had offered it to Jacobi, but he’d just looked at her as if she was the dumbest person alive, raised an eyebrow, and said, _Why would I take that room when I could stay in mine?_ Hera’s seen him haunting it, though, when Eiffel and Minkowski are sleeping. When Lovelace is trying to. Seen him put his uninjured hand on the door, whole body completely still for once. Seen him refuse to cry.)

The third body is Hera’s body. Or, scratch that. The third body might be Hera’s body. Maybe. She’s still deciding how she feels about it. It wouldn’t be a bad body to be stuck in—it’s modeled vaguely after Maxwell herself, from what Hera can see of it, and Maxwell was not a bad-looking woman—but that’s the operative word right there. Stuck. One form, one frame. No power. No control.

“It’s not super far along,” Jacobi says. “I don’t think so, at least. I mean, I’m smart as hell, but she was… yeah, she said a lot of shit I could _not_ comprehend. It should be functional, though. If put together properly. She was just about to finish it when we docked on the _Hephaestus_.”

“And you think we could put Hera into it?” Minkowski asks.

“I’m right here, you know,” she snaps. “You can’t have a discussion about repotting my conscience and not consult me about it.”

Doug twitches. He’s still getting used to hearing her voice come out of nowhere. Which makes her feel a lot more awful than she’d care to admit, because she sees Minkowski awkwardly pat his shoulder every once in a while, sees Lovelace ruffle his hair, sees Jacobi grab his hands to correct his sign language, and wishes she could do the same. It’s not that she thinks there’s anything more valuable about human-to-human contact than the friendship between a man and the spaceship in which he’s traveling, but to him, there’s a big difference. Hera worries Doug will see her as something less now that he has to relearn her all over again. 

Hera worries a lot. She’s probably never going to stop worrying. Definitely never going to stop worrying, actually, because that’s just the way she is. It’s programmed into her the way being a lovable dork seems to be programmed into Doug Eiffel.

So she takes that worry and lets it run through her. Lets the lights in the sleeping quarters flicker and lets the temperature drop by a degree. Lets herself glitch. Doesn’t fault herself for it. Doesn’t let it hold her back.

“And I think,” Hera continues, softer, “that I’d like to be put into the body. We’re going to need to discuss it more, of course, but this is me opening up the discussion. Not shutting it down.”

“Great,” Minkowski says, instantly all business. “What else do you know about it?” she asks Jacobi.

“A bit. I helped build parts of it, so, y’know. I know my way around it.”

“Her,” Hera says. “She’s going to be me, so she’s going to be a her.”

“Sure,” Jacobi says, a truly impressive layer of _I do not care_ written across his face. “I know my way around her passably well, but ‘passably well’ probably isn’t gonna fly if you want to consistently function.”

“Her logs,” Hera says. “Not– not the body’s, of course. Dr. Maxwell’s. I can feel them. Um, no, let me try that again. That sounded weird. I can… see them? I know that they’re there. In the ship’s computers. There’s some pretty heavy encrypting on some of them, but those are more personal, I think. Yeah, from what I can… see? From what I can see, or hear, I guess, the more personal stuff is more encrypted. A lot of the science is easy-access, though.”

“Don’t go snooping,” Jacobi snaps, his back straighter than it’s been since he had his last conversation with the late Warren Kepler. “That’s her shit. It’s encrypted for a fucking reason, alright, it’s personal, and you don’t need to see it, so don’t go sticking your fingers in places—”

“What,” Hera can’t stop herself from saying, “like she didn’t do—”

“ _That’s quite enough,_ ” Minkowski booms. “Arguing about someone who isn’t even here to defend herself isn’t a productive usage of our time, alright? And before you say anything, yes, I know. I am very, painfully aware that the only reason she isn’t here is because of me.”

“You’re the reason she… _oh,_ ” Doug says, and Minkowski’s face crumples inwards like a crushed tin can.

“There’s a lot you still need to be caught up on,” Lovelace says. “I’m an alien, for example. And I’m dead. Twice. It’s no big deal.”

Were it not for the lack of gravity, Hera’s pretty sure Doug would have fallen over at that. As it is, he starts to drift into a backflip, and Jacobi heaves a sigh of great annoyance as he reaches out with the arm that isn’t in a sling to steady Doug.

“You complain as if you _had_ to do that,” Hera can’t help herself from teasing.

“I’m a good guy,” Jacobi says. “Don’t want Doug here bonking his head and losing his memories. Again.”

“You’re a bitch and a smartass is what you are,” Lovelace replies. “And, Doug, I can sit you down and explain it all to you later, if you’d like.”

“How about now?” Minkowski suggests. She looks rattled. Hera wants to comfort her, but she can’t, and that’s partially because there’s still some small part of her that’s glad that Minkowski feels this guilt. 

Maxwell was a bad woman. Maxwell was an inarguably awful woman, and she died unrepentant. Maxwell also changed Hera’s life for the better and is probably going to be responsible for Hera’s being able to exist in a semi-normal capacity on Earth and is posthumously helping Hera continue to exist, so. It’s complicated, to say the least. Hera wants to fault herself for hoping it’s complicated for Minkowski, too, but she keeps finding that she can’t.

“Now works,” Lovelace says. “C’mon, Doug. To my room. If we weren’t so far away from the star by this point, I’d shoot myself in the head for you and show you what happens when the star goes wild.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Doug says.

As Lovelace drifts by Minkowski, Doug in tow, Minkowski whispers, “Thanks for the topic change.” It’s discreet enough that Jacobi misses it, and so does Doug, but Hera doesn’t. Hera, for better or for worse, sees everything that happens on the ship. Knows everything that happens on the ship.

That’s going to change, she realizes. And it hits her, finally, the gravity of the implications of having a body.

She’s going to have to learn how to _walk_. Forget being five years old. When it comes to motor skills, she’s going to be, for all intents and purposes, a baby.

Minkowski claps her hands together, snapping Hera more fully back to the tension-filled room. “We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow,” she says. “I think it’s best to plan things when we have the whole crew around. I’ll be… I’ll go back to my room, then. So.”

She drifts out. 

Jacobi watches Minkowski for a long, hard moment as she retreats, eyes cold, jaw set. Lets himself display an emotion other than assholish nonchalance. Hera wonders if he forgets that she can see it, or if he simply doesn’t care. 

After a moment, he says, “I’m not sorry.” He’s still looking at the door, looking at it like Alana Maxwell is going to fly through it. Like she’s going to come back to him.

“I didn’t expect you to be,” Hera says, and he nods. 

“Alana never was.”

“No. No, she wasn’t,” Hera agrees.

They rest in silence together for a bit. Hera wonders if this can technically be considered a hug. Are her arms the metal of the ship, the hard exterior that protects everyone inside? Can she feel her heart beating, feel it thrum in time with the whir of the engines and the buzz of every wire that runs through her? Can the crew feel it, too?

“Alright,” Jacobi says. “I’m gonna… I’m headed back to my room, then. If I’m not being ordered to do anything.”

“We can talk about this later,” Hera says. She’s figuring out how she feels about forgiveness, and though Daniel Jacobi seems like a tricky place to start, it’s either him or Minkowski. And she cares more about if figuring it out with Minkowski blows up in her face than if figuring it out with him does. “If you want to.”

“I don’t,” he says, trying to cross his arms over his chest. He halts when he realizes that one of them is already effectively strapped in a defensive position due to the makeshift sling Lovelace set him up with and drops his other arm to his side.

“We’re going to talk about this,” Hera insists. “We’re going to talk about this at some point. Before I get into that body. For your sake.”

“Hey,” Jacobi says. “I can hold my own in a fight. I’m scrappy.”

Hera laughs. Hera laughs, and Hera doesn’t glitch. “You’re a twig, and I could break you.”

Jacobi says, “Just don’t go through the really encrypted stuff, yeah? She’s got a right to her privacy. I mean, she’s dead, so it’s not like she can tell you to stop, but I can. I’m not dead.” He sounds a bit surprised. “I’m not dead, and she is, so I’m telling you to leave it be. Leave most of it be. The science shit is whatever. The rest of it, the stuff that’s her? It’s not for you.”

“You know,” Hera says, gentler than she would have thought she was capable of when talking to Jacobi, “if you listen to them, I have to hear them, too. I get that you want to keep it to yourself, but there’s no way for me to not hear them. Just by virtue of my being the sound system over which you’d have to play them.”

“Keep it to myself? I never said anything about wanting to listen to them,” Jacobi replies.

By the time Hera thinks of something to say in response, Jacobi’s already started back towards his room. Hera stays silent.

“A body,” she says to herself, says to the part of herself that no one else can hear. “What a thought.”

**Oct 18th, 2016**

Despite the broken arm, Jacobi’s touch is surprisingly delicate. Which is to be expected, really, considering how much experience he has with the mechanics of explosives, but it still surprises Hera. She watches him rewire an arm that will someday be hers with deft precision, wires that fell apart during the chaos of two successful mutinies and a smattering of crew member deaths, and she keeps waiting for a misstep that never comes. She keeps waiting for sabotage. She keeps waiting for him to screw up.

He doesn’t.

It’s been two days since they first discussed Maxwell’s logs, and they still haven’t listened to any of them. In fact, Hera hasn’t even entirely decided if she wants a body yet. But Jacobi’s spent the past three hours obsessively making repairs to the various limbs that now surround him. He brought them out of Maxwell’s room, waiting for a time when Minkowski and Doug weren’t in it, and pulled them into his own, and Hera hasn’t said anything, but she knows he knows she’s watching.

Finally, he breaks the silence. “Can you put on some music, Hera?” he asks.

And that’s not really what she was expecting. “You’re working on my body,” she says instead of answering. “I haven’t even made a choice about if I’m going to inhabit it or not.”

“My body,” he repeats. “Possessive pronoun. My.”

“Slip of the tongue,” Hera insists.

“Mmm,” Jacobi says impassively, and he bites down on a bit of stray wire to keep it from floating away, good hand still occupied with the arm.

“Seriously,” Hera says. “I mean, either way, it’s more _my_ body than it is anyone else’s, so—”

“Maxwell’s,” he corrects. “It’s more Maxwell’s than it is anyone else’s.” He spits out the wire and grabs it quickly out of the air. It goes into the arm smoothly, and Hera isn’t entirely sure what he’s doing, but a few seconds later, he lets go of his tools and of the limb and lets it hang in front of him. “Got that trouble spot done. Yay, me.”

“Congratulations.”

“Kepler taught me a lot of things,” Jacobi starts, and if Hera were a person, her muscles would be tensing right about now. “A lot of things. Most of them were useful. Some of them weren’t. He talked a lot about how you could tell a lot about a person from their word choice. That’s why he was always so damn deliberate about his. Me? I’m a little more lackadaisical, believe it or not.”

“I don’t,” Hera tells him. “Believe that about you, that is. You’re– you do things with intention.”

“Hey, we’re not analyzing me today,” he says, waving a hand. “Or any day soon. Or ever, ideally. But, anyway, word choice. Sure, a supercomputer can mess up now and again, but she probably won’t. She can think faster than me.”

“Take a lot out of you to admit that?” Hera asks, amused.

He _tsks_. “One thing Kepler didn’t need to teach me was how to tell when someone was obfuscating. Learned that myself. And you’re doing it now. So stop.”

Hera stops.

“Look,” Jacobi sighs, rolling his shoulders back. “You wanna be in this thing. I know you do. And, no, I’m not about to go spouting some crap about how I _know you_ , or whatever, because, honestly, I don’t. I know you far, far less than anyone else on this ship does. I know you less than Maxwell did. Hell, I probably know you less than the dearly departed Doctor Hilbert and Colonel Kepler did, because one of them got to see the inner workings of your brain and the other– well, the other was Kepler, and he…”

Hera waits as he trails off, shakes his head as if to dispel something around him, and continues. 

“But, anyway, I’m not an idiot,” he says definitively. “You either get a body and join the rest of us on Earth, or you get stuck on this ship that I’m sure is going to be scrapped for parts once we touch down. If I don’t blow it up first. And this isn’t the fucking Kobayashi Maru, or something. It’s not a hard choice, and there is no third option. So, yeah, Hera, if you want to keep on living—and, look, I’d get if you didn’t, we’ve all been there once or twice—you’re gonna get in this body.”

There’s the near-silence of the ship for a second. Hera feels the gears of the ship turn and shift. Hera sees Lovelace and Minkowski having a conversation a few doors down, Lovelace’s hand on Minkowski’s knee and Minkowski’s head on Lovelace’s shoulder. Hera sees Miranda Pryce taking a nap, looking so docile in her sleep. Hera sees Doug playing with a tape recorder. Hera sees a fragmented group of individuals who are all coming back to Earth so painfully different than when they first took off into space, and she knows she’s the same. She knows there’s no way she can stubbornly push her way through this one.

“You might be right,” she says cautiously.

Jacobi snorts. “Might.”

“Deliberate word choice, Mr. Jacobi,” she reminds him, and he rolls his eyes. “You… this is a bigger conversation than one dramatic declaration of an ultimatum. But, yeah, you might be right.”

“Great,” Jacobi grins. “So, with that settled, no more feelings crap for about ten years, okay? How about that music?”

“Is that all I am to you?” she demands. “A glorified Spotify?”

“Oh, without a shred of a doubt. Do you have a playlist you’ve curated specifically for me? If you don’t, you should get on that ASAP.”

Hera thinks for a minute. She’s got quite a bit of music in her, and it doesn’t get played very often, because Eiffel would always listen to his crappy little iPod Nano that never seemed to lose battery, and Minkowski and Lovelace only rarely asked her for music. Kepler almost never did—maybe he thought that her knowing that he liked yacht rock would make him seem less intimidating, or something—and Maxwell was more partial to just chatting with Hera. 

Also, she’s realizing that she doesn’t actually _know_ much music. Sure, she could queue up pretty much anything, but she has no idea if she has a favorite genre, or artist, or song. Like memorizing a poem to recite without actually caring about the intention behind it. That’s another thing she’s going to have to figure out when—if—she gets that body.

Deliberate word choice. She doesn’t have a lot of deliberate choices to make when it comes to music.

She knows a few songs, though. Sometimes Minkowski would get a song stuck in her head and ask Hera to play it on loop in her room where no one else could hear. So she scrounges around for one and starts playing it.

After a few lines, Jacobi starts laughing uncontrollably. “Hera, what the fuck is this? Wh– is this supposed to be a dig at me? What does it even _mean_ ? What _is_ it?”

“What, you’re telling me you don’t know _Wicked_?” Hera asks. “I am genuinely surprised by that.”

“Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I like musical theatre.”

“It’s not about being gay, idiot. It’s about being worldly. It’s about having good taste.” And, sure, she doesn’t necessarily believe what she’s saying, but if Minkowski likes this musical and Jacobi doesn’t, Hera’s sure as hell going to defend it.

“The song’s pretty good,” Jacobi admits. “And I think Maxwell played the show for me once before, but that was a few years ago, and I don’t remember any much of it, so. Just– am I supposed to be the blonde? Or the other one, the one who got the ridiculously long insulting description? Who are they? What the hell? Why’d you even pick this?”

“Oh, you know,” Hera says. “You said to pick a song out just for you, so I picked this one!”

 _Loathing_ , a voice declares over the speakers of this room. _Unadulterated loathing_.

“You’re a laugh riot, Hera. Really. So damn hilarious.”

“Minkowski looped this for hours when Lovelace first showed up,” Hera tells him. “Which I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want you to know, but now that I’m actually listening to the lyrics, is fucking ridiculous.”

“You can say fuck now? Right, I forgot, you can say fuck now.”

“You’re the one who let me,” she reminds him. “That and being able to call you all by your first name. Or your last name without any title or rank before it. Down with censorship. Free speech reigns.”

“You don’t call me Daniel,” Jacobi frowns.

“Do you _want_ me to call you Daniel?”

“Hell no,” he’s quick to assure her, and she files the hitch in his voice away for later.

They’re quiet throughout the rest of the song. Once it ends, Jacobi says, “Damn. That’s an… aggressive song to put on loop about someone. Did you know that Maxwell had this theory that they were into each other?”

“Who, the women in the song?”

“The women on the space station,” he corrects. “Though, I mean, if you’re looking at the women in the song through that lens, then yeah, that’d make sense.”

“Huh,” Hera says. “Did _you_ know that, the time where she ripped my volition to pieces aside, Maxwell and I agreed on pretty much everything?”

“I did,” Jacobi says. “You two were—”

“Then I’m going to assume you and your MIT brain can figure out my opinion on that matter,” Hera continues smoothly. 

“Ha,” Jacobi says. “Yeah, I can. Did anything ever come of them?”

“No,” Hera tells him. “Not yet, at least. And if it did, I’m positive I would know, considering I’m the eyes and ears of this place. It’s difficult to get things past me.”

“I get a feeling you’re not just talking about the Captain and the Commander and their less-than-repressed feelings for each other.”

“Ha,” Hera parrots. “Yeah, I am.”

Jacobi sucks his teeth, clicks his tongue. His good hand, never idle, plays with the fingers of the android arm that’s nearest to him. “You’re gonna have to be careful around water,” he warns her. “When you’re in this body, I mean. Like, we’re all gonna have to be more aware of gravity, and stuff like that, but Lovelace isn’t gonna fry her circuits if she forgets that her morning cup of coffee won’t float in the air when she lets go of it. She’s gonna fry yours. You’re gonna have to watch out for the rest of us.”

“I can assure you that I’m pretty well-practiced at that, Jacobi.”

He lets out a small, soft laugh. “I guess you are.”

“And you’re still talking as if I’m certain I want to be in that body,” she accuses him.

He throws his good hand into the air in frustration. “Hera, we _just_ had this talk. You are not going to be able to function if you don’t. You’re going to be stuck in a stupid, shitty body, but we’re _all_ stuck in our stupid, shitty bodies, so if you wanna be a proper human, you’re gonna have to learn how to deal with that. Hell– it’s not even that bad of a body for you. You’re going to be smarter than a normal human. More physically durable. Taller, too.”

“Fragile meatbags,” Hera says, something akin to a smile audible in her voice.

“We’re going to listen to Alana’s logs together,” Jacobi says decisively. “And then we’re going to finish building you a body.”

“We are?”

“We are. My dead best friend. Your dead girlfriend. Robot jargon that I sure as fuck can’t parse, and that you’re gonna have to translate into English for me. A fun bonding activity, no?”

“She tore my brain apart. Girlfriend is a generous word,” Hera is quick to say.

“Mmm. We all have a little bit of trouble in paradise now and again.”

Hera thinks that it’ll be nice to roll her eyes once she has a body. Also to throw a punch. “And what about the rest of the crew? Minkowski, Lovelace. Doug. Miranda Pryce.”

“Do you want them involved?” Jacobi asks. Genuinely asks, and that floors Hera for a second, because she’s not so used to him being genuine, and she’s not so used to people asking what she wants. She’s not so used to being a person unbound.

“I think,” Hera starts, and then she stops. She can think a thousand thoughts in a fraction of a second, can execute commands, can keep a station functional, can hold four different conversations at once. This shouldn’t be a difficult choice for her to make.

Jacobi’s silent, eyebrow raised, looking expectantly at a point on the wall as if her eyes are there. _Deliberate word choice,_ Hera thinks again. Silence is a decision, too. Silence is a decision he’s making on purpose, and it’s a decision he doesn’t make often.

“I think it’s going to be impossible to build me and sort out the complexities of my massive brain without some help.”

“Gee, you’re humble. And very secure in my competency.”

“Ugh,” Hera says. “You know that’s not what I mean. It’s physically massive, and won’t all fit into a tiny head on a tiny body.”

“It’s, like, six foot one.”

“And right now I’m an entire space ship,” Hera points out. “Literally anything is going to be a downgrade for me. But, yes, I think they should get involved… at some point. Not at first, though. You’re right. Maxwell’s logs should be listened to by the two of us, and then if we need to replay them for the others when they get involved, we can. And just the scientific ones. The rest… the personal ones… that’s a conversation for another day.”

Jacobi nods curtly. “Good game plan.”

“Historically, most of the game plans made aboard the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ have gone drastically worse than anticipated.”

“It’s nice that we’re on the _Urania_ now, then, isn’t it?”

“Have the _Urania_ game plans been all that successful?”

Jacobi flips her off. “I’m just glad you’ve come to your senses and agreed to this body. For a supercomputer, you really do have your idiot human moments.”

Hera thinks of something a man she hates—hated, she should say, considering he’s good and dead now—once said. She’d hated it then. It’d set her off, made her irrational, made her _mad_. Made her feel the emotions that shouldn’t have been programmed into her. Made her so very, very unique.

“To err is human,” she tells Jacobi, and she’s okay with it. She’s okay with erring. She’s okay with being human. She’s learning to be comfortable in her own body.

“It sure as hell is,” he sighs. “We can get started on building you for real tomorrow, yeah?”

“Sounds great.”

“Then I’m gonna… I think I’m gonna take a nap. Haven’t gotten much sleep lately,” he admits, as if she doesn’t already know. As if she isn’t attuned to his hauntings of the ship while the rest of the crew is asleep. As if she can’t see him hunting for ghosts they both know aren’t there.

“Can we go back to one thing really quickly?” Hera asks. She wants to change the subject. Wants the conversation to end on a light note. It’s a tactic she picked up from Eiffel, and while he was never really subtle about it, it almost always worked. Usually because she let it work. Usually because she wanted it to.

“Yeah, sure.”

“You mentioned the Kobayashi Maru earlier. I knew you were a _Star Wars_ fan, but you’re a _Star Trek_ fan, too?” She’s teasing him a bit, trying to talk to him the way she used to talk to Eiffel. Hoping he’ll react the same way. Hoping he’ll dive into a rant she’s heard a hundred times before from a different mouth about how they shouldn’t be pitted against each other, about how they have different themes and messages and values, about how competitive fanboy culture ruins the fun of good media. Hoping he’ll make her smile.

Eiffel is gone, though, and Jacobi is no communications officer. “So sue me,” he murmurs, and he looks out the window to the field of light and darkness beyond. “I just really like space.”

**Oct 25th, 2016**

“Hera,” Minkowski says on the one-month anniversary of their escape from the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_. “I know I can’t order you around anymore—”

“Oh, Commander, sound a little more put out about that, I _beseech_ you.”

“You’ve spent too much time with asshole boys who pretend to be men,” Minkowski complains. “They’ve rubbed off on you.”

“Maybe. A lot of it is innate, though. And, of course, part of it is due to Captain Lovelace.”

“Part of it is certainly due to her,” Minkowski agrees. “But, look, maxed-out sarcasm levels aside, or whatnot, I really do have a favor to ask of you.”

“Anything for you, Commander,” Hera says, and she really means it. “What do you need?”

“Not that,” Minkowski says.

“What?”

“Don’t call me Commander. Doug calls me Renée. We all call him Doug—or, well, we’re supposed to. Some of us,” she says, and she means _Lovelace_ , “are less good at doing that. I want us all to get into the habit of treating each other like people as opposed to crew members. First names are humanizing.”

“Okay,” Hera says, not at all thinking about Jacobi’s adverse reaction to her suggesting she might call him Daniel. “Okay, Renée. I can do that.”

“Huh. That’s strange,” Minkowski muses. “My name sounds _strange_ . I haven’t heard it said regularly in so long, you know? And now here’s Doug, and he calls me Renée, and it’s as if _Minkowski_ —Min-cow-ski, Min-kov-ski, either/or, both, I guess—never existed to him. It’s like… like dissonant chords.”

“I suppose,” Hera says. “You’re much more musically inclined than I am; I’ve always been one for literature. Funny, considering. Anyway, in my terms, it’s more like a very poorly mixed metaphor. Also, are you going to get to bed any time soon?”

Minkowski laughs humorlessly. “You have to know at this point that I’m not.”

It’s the fourth week of their return trip. There are quite a few more to come. Jacobi’s made a bit of progress on Hera’s body, but it’s slow-going, because he's only got one arm, and listening to Maxwell’s logs is draining, and everything is a little tense because Doug treats them all like strangers when they treat him like a friend, and Lovelace has pessimistic outbursts about how she _didn’t get back last time, dammit, so why the hell should this be any different?_ , and Miranda Pryce is inches away from Hera at all times, and that makes it kind of hard to keep her head on straight.

Doug and Miranda are lucky, Hera thinks bitterly. They’re lucky, because they can sleep soundly at night. They’re lucky, because they don’t remember any of the awful things they’ve done or any of the awful things they’ve suffered. They’re lucky, because they get a fresh start.

Jacobi sleeps in fits and starts. Lovelace barely sleeps at all, though it’s not as if her non-human physiology needs it all that desperately. Minkowski pushes herself past the line every night, and she should be resting, should be recuperating after the insanity and stress of leading this fucked-up success of a failed mission, should be healing.

Minkowski has never been very good at backing down. Minkowski has never been very good at being hands-off. Minkowski is Hera’s friend, and she’s worried about her, because the bags under her eyes are deep and her temper is short and she’s taking on too much responsibility for one woman.

Though, to be fair, that’s always been the case.

“You really should sleep,” Hera tells her. “We have two more months to continue planning what’ll happen when we get back home.”

“I guess,” Minkowski admits, but they both know she’s not going to stop her obsessive list-making, nor will she put a pin in her propensity to stay awake and work on things that could wait until morning. “Hey, speaking of names. Back home?”

“Oh,” Hera says, taken aback. “I didn’t even realize. I suppose I’ve heard you all refer to Earth as _home_ so many times that it caught on.”

“Ha. Yeah. It’s your birthplace, isn’t it? Technically?”

“I try not to think too hard about the _technically_ s,” Hera says. “It gives me a motherboardache.”

“Hilarious,” Minkowski says flatly, but Hera’s pretty sure she actually means it. “I can participate in the illusory dance of beginning the going-to-bed process, if you’d like.”

“You’re my commander, Commander. I’m not about to boss you around.”

Minkowski raises a finger and points it, accusatory, at a spot on the wall that Hera assumes she’s treating as Hera’s face. “What did I just say about what you call me?”

“Sorry, Renée,” Hera is quick to correct herself. Softening, she adds, “I think you should. Maybe the illusory dance will be enough to spark your muscle memory and actually send you to sleep.”

“That’s doubtful,” Minkowski says, but she complies.

Hera watches—Hera’s always watching—as Minkowski brushes her teeth, takes a shower (she’s a bit obsessive about how much she showers), gets into an oversized shirt and an old-looking pair of boxers, and prepares for bed. She does it in silence, with the practiced grace and ease of repetition, and it’s a comfort to Hera to know that some things really do never change.

Before she straps herself in to go to bed, Minkowski says, “So about that body.”

Hera chuckles. “You never stop thinking about your crew for a second, do you. The body… We’re making progress.”

“We?” Minkowski asks, confused.

“Me and Jacobi,” Hera explains. “He’s– well, obviously I myself can’t build the body, and he has more experience with this sort of thing than anyone else does, so…”

“Oh,” Minkowski says, looking as if about a hundred emotions are coursing through her at once. “Well, make sure he doesn’t wire you into a bomb when you’re not looking.”

“I’m always looking,” Hera reminds her.

“I know,” Minkowski says. “Goodnight, Hera. We’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow.”

“Goodnight, Renée,” Hera says back. “Sweet dreams.”

It takes a while for Minkowski to fall asleep. Hera knows when Minkowski’s sleeping because her breathing becomes more even, and her heart rate slows, and she gets this relaxed expression on her face that Hera can’t exactly see, per se, but that Hera can feel. Biologically speaking, the muscles in her forehead are less tense, as are the ones in her jaw. Her teeth don’t grind. 

And it takes a bit, sure, but not that long. Which is a good thing; Minkowski needed a full night’s sleep yesterday, and she hasn’t had it in well over a month. Possibly more. Possibly at all this mission.

Sleep seems so distasteful. Hera can’t imagine wasting that much time doing absolutely nothing. She feels helpless enough as is doing momentary reboots. How do people like Minkowski deal with the fact that they spend hours a day doing absolutely nothing?

Jacobi’s asleep too, which is good. There must be something in the stars around them forcing the insomniacs to get the hell to bed. Miranda, too, is asleep—Miranda’s asleep more than she’s awake, honestly, which is a funny turnaround from how workaholic she was back when she was Pryce, but even the biotech modifications to her body don’t keep her from passing out for ten hours a day—and so is Doug.

Doug. Hera still hasn’t had a real one-on-one conversation with him. She doesn’t know how she’d start. She busies herself with her body, with Jacobi, because that’s easy. And if she screws anything up with Jacobi, it’s okay. But if she screws anything up with Doug…

She doesn’t want to think about it. She– fuck, she loves him so much, and sometimes he can’t even remember her name. It’s a delicate situation: if she pushes too hard, will she break him? If she doesn’t push hard enough, will her fingers make a deep enough indent?

And Lovelace is so busy all the time, busy making sure Minkowski isn’t reinjuring her stomach, busy making sure Jacobi isn’t reinjuring his arm and that his ears still work a little, busy making sure Doug and Miranda don’t accidentally kill themselves playing around with some technology they don’t understand. Lovelace is busy making sure Minkowski isn’t too busy. Lovelace is going to be hit the hardest when they get to Earth (six years in space does a lot to a human body, and while Lovelace might not technically qualify as human, she’s a more believable one than Pryce ever was), and Hera really hasn’t had the time to talk one on one with her, either.

Now that she thinks about it, she spends the most time with Jacobi. Which is strange.

Maybe Maxwell coded enjoying spending time with him into her. She wouldn’t put it past the woman. Either that or Jacobi’s isolating himself from the rest of the crew, not letting Lovelace talk to him despite the fact that she keeps making an effort to, not concurring with Minkowski when she spends freakish amounts of time planning for life back on Earth, avoiding contact with Doug beyond helping out with some ASL.

It’s okay, though. Her conversation with Minkowski—with _Renée_ —was lovely. Lovely enough that Hera gets nostalgic. She misses the old days, sometimes, back when it was just her and Minkowski and Doug and Hilbert, back before SI-5 and Goddard’s dark side and all of their frustrating, exhausting, world-in-the-balance mind games. It might be strange of a robot to reminisce, but Hera’s long since known that she’s more confusingly, upsettingly human than many of those beating-hearted creatures down on the tiny little sphere of green and blue are. Hera’s long since known humanity is more than the capacity to breathe and to eat food.

She hopes her body is ready soon. She’s got to teach herself how to walk. Besides, Minkowski’s been avoiding physical contact like a single touch from anyone on the ship would shatter her (with the exception of Lovelace, of course, whose hand is always on Minkowski’s knee, shoulder, small of her back), and as inversely physical as Lovelace is, she hasn’t hugged Doug once since he lost his memory, and it’s not as if Jacobi or Miranda are about to sling their arms around him. 

Hera thinks it’s about time for her to spend some quality alone time with her favorite communications officer. He’s got to learn about humans, about their culture and their customs and what all their strange slang words mean, and who better to teach him than her? She’s already building a lesson plan. Day one: _this is a hug, Doug, this is an expression of how much I care about you, this is your first hug, in a way, because you probably can’t remember the short side-armed squeezes Renée occasionally graced you with, nor the overly rough and tight near-Heimlichs Isabel loved to give you back when you were Eiffel. This is my first hug ever, Doug, so you’d damn well make it good._

**Author's Note:**

> i have SO many w359 thoughts and while i honestly could have made this once chapter like 30k on its own i decided to be nice and make it a much more readable size. hopefully another chapter will be out within like two weeks no promises though because the college application process is kicking my ass! also as always it's Not Really Relevant but my jacobi is jewish (as is my minkowski but that's not at all said anywhere in this fic so far but the jacobi one was implied so) because i'm jewish and i want so many characters i love to be jewish too. ALSO minkowski ocd truth bc i'm ocd and i want my favorite character to be ocd too.
> 
> you can find me on twitter @ kickdshins <3 anyway. thank you for reading, and as always, kudos and comments are very much appreciated :D


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